In public sector procurement, social welfare often depends on the time taken to complete the contract. A leading example is highway construction, where slow completion times inflict a negative externality on commuters. Recently, highway departments have introduced innovative contracting methods...

We study the relationship between collusion and corruption in a stylized model of repeated procurement where the cost of reporting corrupt bureaucrats gives rise to a free riding problem. As in Dixit (2015, 2016), cooperation among honest suppliers alleviates free-riding in reporting. However,...

In this paper I run a regression discontinuity design analysis to document the causal effect of mayor's wage on procurement outcomes in a large data base of public procurement contracts in Italy. To identify the wage effect, I use peculiarities of the Italian legislation where mayor's...

We analyze the problem of a buyer who purchases a long-term project from one of several suppliers. A changing state of the world influences the costs of the suppliers. Complete contracts conditioning on all future realizations of the state are infeasible. We show that contractual incompleteness...

This chapter revisits the interaction between the EU rules on State aid and on public procurement. It probes the standard presumption that compliance with EU procurement rules excludes the existence of State aid because public tenders are apt to replicate market conditions and thus suppress any...

Many policymakers and researchers study and debate how to control and limit corruption. Few have examined the mechanisms by which corruption distorts markets and how they may be influenced to mitigate negative effects. To develop this new perspective, we study how corruption effects the...

This paper provides novel evidence that female U.S. House Representatives causally increase the U.S. government's demand for products and services provided by female entrepreneurs. Using detailed data on individual contracts between the U.S. federal government and private firms around close U.S....

The government wants two tasks to be performed. In each task, unobservable effort can be exerted by a wealth-constrained private contractor. If the government faces no binding budget constraints, it is optimal to bundle the tasks. The contractor in charge of both tasks then gets a bonus payment...

Motivated by the EU concept of Pre-Commercial Procurement and the massivepresence of SMEs in the European economy, we study how budget constraints affect R&D effort in sequential elimination tournaments. We show that introducingbudget constraints leads to a non-monotonicity in unconstrained...